Head to Transylvania for Byron, Derrick, and Justin’s review of Young Frankenstein starring Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle, on this week’s Saturday Doobie Feature.

Spark the show:

*Prop 64 Compliant show recorded in California for Adults 21+

About the Movie

Plot (Spoilers):Dr. Frederick Frankenstein is a lecturing physician at an American medical school and engaged to the tightly wound socialite Elizabeth. He becomes exasperated when anyone brings up the subject of his grandfather Victor Frankenstein, the infamous mad scientist; to dissociate himself from his forebear, Frederick insists that his surname is pronounced ‘Fronkensteen’. When a solicitor informs him that he has inherited his family’s estate in Transylvania after the death of his great-grandfather, the Baron Beaufort von Frankenstein, Frederick travels to Europe to inspect the property. At the Transylvania train station, he is met by a hunchbacked, bug-eyed servant named Igor, and a lovely young personal assistant named Inga.

Upon arrival at the estate, Frederick meets the forbidding housekeeper Frau Blücher. After discovering the secret entrance to his grandfather’s laboratory and reading his private journals, Frederick is so captivated that he decides to resume his grandfather’s experiments in re-animating the dead. He and Igor steal the corpse of a recently executed criminal, and Frederick sets to work experimenting on the large corpse. Matters go awry when Igor is sent to steal the brain of a deceased revered historian, Hans Delbrück; startled by his own reflection, he drops and ruins Delbrück’s brain. Taking a second brain, Igor returns with a brain labeled “Abnormal” which Igor mistakenly thinks is a name (“Abbie Normal”), and Frederick unknowingly transplants it into the corpse.

Soon, Frederick is ready to re-animate his creature, who is eventually brought to life by electrical charges during a lightning storm. The creature takes its first halting steps, but, frightened by Igor lighting a match, he attacks Frederick and must be sedated. Meanwhile, the townspeople are uneasy at the possibility of Frederick continuing his grandfather’s work, unaware of the creature’s existence; most concerned is Inspector Kemp, a one-eyed police official with a prosthetic arm, whose German accent is so thick that even his own countrymen cannot understand him. Kemp visits the doctor and subsequently demands assurance that he will not create another monster. Upon returning to the lab, Frederick discovers Blücher setting the creature free. After she reveals the monster’s love of violin music and her own romantic relationship with Frederick’s grandfather, the creature is enraged by sparks from a thrown switch and escapes from the Frankenstein castle.

While roaming the countryside, the monster has frustrating encounters with a young girl and a blind hermit. Frederick recaptures the monster and locks the two of them in a room, where he calms the monster’s homicidal tendencies with flattery and fully acknowledges his own heritage, shouting out emphatically, “My name is Frankenstein!”. Frederick offers the sight of “The Creature” following simple commands to a theater full of illustrious guests. The demonstration continues with Frederick and the monster launching into the musical number “Puttin’ On the Ritz”. However, the routine ends disastrously when a stage light explodes and frightens the monster, who becomes enraged and charges into the audience, where he is captured and chained by police. Back in the laboratory, Inga attempts to comfort Frederick and they wind up sleeping together on the suspended reanimation table.

The monster escapes when Frederick’s fiancée Elizabeth arrives unexpectedly for a visit, taking Elizabeth captive as he flees. Elizabeth falls in love with the creature due to his inhuman stamina and his enormous penis (referred to as Schwanstücker or Schwanzstück). The townspeople hunt for the monster. Desperate to get the creature back, Frederick plays the violin to lure his creation back to the castle and recaptures him. Just as the Kemp-led mob storms the laboratory, Frankenstein transfers some of his stabilizing intellect to the creature who, as a result, is able to reason with and placate the mob. Elizabeth—with her hair styled identically to that of the female creature from the Bride of Frankenstein—marries the now erudite and sophisticated monster, while Inga joyfully learns what her new husband Frederick got in return during the transfer procedure—the monster’s Schwanzstücker.

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